Fight Against Sex Crimes Holds Colleges to Account

Emma Sulkowicz said she knew it would be awful to go before a disciplinary panel and describe being raped by a fellow Columbia student, but nothing prepared her for what came next. She said one of the two women on the panel, a university official, asked her, repeatedly, how the painful sex act she described was physically possible.

Worse still, for her, was the outcome: The panel dismissed her accusation – the same result from sexual assault complaints against the same man that year by two other students.

Increasingly, stories like this are playing out at colleges across the country, as more victims go public, more of them file formal federal complaints, a new network of activists makes shrewd use of the law and the media, and the Obama administration steps up pressure on colleges. Last week, a White House task force recommended a set of practices for measuring the problem, educating students and treating both accuser and accused.

While there is scant evidence that sexual assault is more or less prevalent than in the past, the storm of attention has forced university administrators to pay more attention to a largely unfamiliar set of duties, more akin to social work and criminal justice than to education.

And it has exposed what many administrators and experts now say is all too clear, that while the world has been changing, higher education has done a poor job of understanding the shifts and responding to them.

“It just hasn't been on most university administrators' agendas,” said Bonnie S. Fisher, a professor at the University of Cincinnati's School of Criminal Justice and an author of some of the largest studies of campus sex crimes.

Today, dozens of universities, including USC, UC Berkeley and Occidental College in California and Harvard, Princeton, Florida State and Ohio State, are under federal investigation for their handling of sexual assault.

“I worry that, effectively, we forgot about the extent to which we're dealing with young people who go away from home ... we don't necessarily think hard enough about how we should make sure it's a safe environment,” said Nicholas B. Dirks, Berkeley chancellor.

Dirks said some aspects defied easy responses, such as balancing a student's desire for anonymity against her request that the university enforce physical separation between her and the person she accuses. But he also mentioned flaws he said Berkeley had recently corrected or set out to correct – confusing directions online about where and how to file a misconduct report, for example.

And some agree that improvements have been made. Colby Bruno, a lawyer at the Victim Rights Law Center in Boston who works on campus sexual assault cases, said, “We regularly see schools actually holding attackers responsible, even expelling them, which we just didn't see just three or four years ago.”

Columbia says it has already changed some of its policies. Now two investigators, rather than one, carry out the initial interviews and take notes. The confidentiality policy has been eased to make it clear that accusers can seek support from friends and family. And the university is planning to beef up the consent education program for freshmen from 50 minutes to two hours and to add additional sessions throughout the year.

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